From the June 2005 Southern Stakeholder brief (bottom of page 2):
http://southernrailway.com/pdfs/stak...e-05-Brief.pdf

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Oyster cards on Southern

We are often asked when Oyster Pre-Pay will be available on our
network. The answer is as soon as possible; unfortunately this is
unlikely to be before 2007.

Oyster card season tickets are already accepted on the railway across
London. Oyster Pre-Pay is a much more complex product designed for a
fully gated system and TfL fare structures. As the rail system is
different in this respect there are significant issues to overcome to
ensure that passengers don't get overcharged and to minimise the
opportunity for fare evasion. One example is the high cost of
installing gates or Oyster card readers at stations. There are also
issues around the compatibility of Oyster with the alternative smart
card standard called ITSO (see: http://www.itso.org.uk/about.asp). The
various issues will take some time to sort out - TfL planned Oyster for
4 years before the cards were made public.

Southern is committed to introducing this technology as soon as
possible and will continue to work with the industry and other partners
to that end.
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Mizter T wrote:

Oyster card season tickets are already accepted on the railway across
London. Oyster Pre-Pay is a much more complex product designed for a
fully gated system and TfL fare structures.

Doesn't quite make sence. Southern (& presumably other TOCs) are quite
happy to accept Oyster seasons which effectively work along with ticket
gates and barriers. The real answer is that Oyster can't work with NR
stupid point to point fares structure when they ought to be working to a
purely zonal fares system by now.

One example is the high cost of installing gates or Oyster card readers
at stations.

Gates (and the associated extra costs of having staff on hand) maybe.
However I can't really see that the costs of installing readers at all
remaining NR stations in the Travelcard area will be that costly.


--
Phil Richards
London, UK
Home Page: http://www.philrichards1.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

"Mizter T" wrote in message
oups.com...

Oyster card season tickets are already accepted on the railway across
London. Oyster Pre-Pay is a much more complex product designed for a
fully gated system and TfL fare structures. As the rail system is
different in this respect there are significant issues to overcome to
ensure that passengers don't get overcharged and to minimise the
opportunity for fare evasion. One example is the high cost of
installing gates or Oyster card readers at stations. There are also
issues around the compatibility of Oyster with the alternative smart
card standard called ITSO (see: http://www.itso.org.uk/about.asp). The
various issues will take some time to sort out - TfL planned Oyster for
4 years before the cards were made public.

There is a good article by Roger Ford, in his "Informed Sources" column of
the new (August) edition of "Modern Railways" for those who are interested.
Basically, the conundrum is whether to go with the existing
non-ITSO-compliant Oyster when the APTIS machines are replaced in 2006
(APTIS can currently cope with Oyster due to some clever coding that took
advantage of spare capacity within the machines) or whether to wait and go
with a fully ITSO-compliant system. It also points out that of the three
current replacement systems for APTIS (Tribute, Shere Smart and Fujitsu
Star) *none* of these currently have Oyster capability!